A while back, I wanted vector playing card faces (traditional) and all I could find that were free were simply crap. And seeing how I'm a cheap bastard, I didn't want to buy them either.

So for the sake of every else out there (and to hone my vector image creation skills), I've created a complete set and offer them under an "attribution type" open source license.

Essentially these high quality images are completely free to use as long as one complies with the need to properly credit/attribute the set as part of their project (per the formal attributions set up in the download documents)

"I struggle to be brief, and become obscure."—Horace
"Some people think that the deck is a creamery."—The Secrets of Bro. John Hamman
"There is an old saying that 'The poof is in the pudding.'"—found on The Magic Café

The owner of that design site was really nice and e-mailed me right before he posted that up. I'm a bit biased, but I think the card graphics turned out pretty well for his article.

The set has been a lot more popular than I thought it would be. It's been downloaded 2000+ times from something like 20-30 different countries. I've gotten some really nice e-mails of people using them in ipad games, for library projects, programming projects, and someone even managed to squeeze them on to an iphone. And at least one set of magic notes, but I can't remember who that was.

"On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog... but everybody knows if you're a jackass."

As I suspected might happen, I've had all kinds of people getting back to me telling me how they have used these free card graphics.

Librarians using them to decorate for events, programmers using them in card games on the iphone and ipad, at least one use in a set of card notes, a guy who made vinyl decals out of them, and many more.

But this next guy tested the limits of vector printing. Because of their nature, vectors can be printed at any size without loss of detail. The downside is that printing at that size shows even the smallest flaw. I continually tweak the set to mitigate this, so it's great to see how nice the King of Spades looks on top of this mini cooper.